Become a Problem Solving Crime Analyst

126 Pages·2003·1.08 MB·English

Become a Problem
Solving Crime Analyst
In 55 small steps
1
Become a Problem Solving
Crime Analyst
In 55 small steps
er M
Handl Offender Place anager
CRIME
Target/victim
Guardian
Ronald V. Clarke
John Eck
Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science
University College London
Published by
Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science
University College London
29/30 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9QU
© Ronald Clarke and John Eck 2003
All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence
permitting copying in the UK issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham
Court Road, London, W1T 4LP
First published 2003
ISBN 0-9545607-0-1
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Project management by Deer Park Productions
Design and typeset by Pantek Arts Ltd
Printed and bound by Ashford Colour Press
Ronald Clarke
Ronald Clarke is Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers, The
State University of New Jersey, and Visiting Professor at the Jill
Dando Institute of Crime Science. He worked for many years
in the Home Office Research and Planning Unit where he con-
tributed to the development of situational crime prevention
and the British Crime Survey. He has recently undertaken case
studies of problem-oriented policing together with Herman
Goldstein. He helped to develop the Center for Problem-
Oriented Policing and the Problem-Oriented Guide Series for
the US Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Dr
Clarke is chair of the judges for the annual Herman Goldstein
Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing. He can be
reached at: [email protected]
John Eck
John Eck is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of
Cincinnati. He has contributed to the development of problem-
oriented policing since 1984 when he studied the first full scale
attempt to implement the concept in the United States at
Newport News, Virginia. He helped to develop a number of now
standard techniques in problem solving, including the SARA
model and the crime analysis triangle. He was a cofounder of
the International Problem-Oriented Policing Conference held
annually in San Diego. Dr Eck has served as consultant to the
London Metropolitan Police and since 1999 has been a judge for
the Tilley Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing. He
can be reached at: [email protected]
Acknowledgements
In assembling this manual we have drawn freely on the work of many colleagues and friends to
whom we owe a large debt of gratitude. Those who have commented on drafts of or supplied
material for the manual include: Pat and Paul Brantingham, Andy Brumwell, Rachel Boba, Kate
Bowers, Barbie Brookover, Spencer Chainey, Paul Ekblom, Graham Farrell, Bonnie Fisher,
Herman Goldstein, Alex Hirschfield, Shane Johnson, Scott Keay, Johannes Knutsson, Gloria
Laycock, Mangai Natarajan, Michael Maxfield, Ken Pease, Nanci Plouffe, Barry Poyner, Jerry
Ratcliffe, George Rengert, Nick Ross, Kim Rossmo, Karin Schmerler, Nick Tilley, Julie Wartell, Barry
Webb and John Wooldredge. We owe special thanks to Marcus Felson who helped design the
manual and who supplied material for some of the sections. Finally, we thank the Home Office for
sponsoring our work.
The 55 Steps
Prepare yourself
1. Read this first
2. Rethink your job
3. Be the local crime expert
4. Know the limits of conventional policing
Learn about problem-oriented policing
5. Become a POP expert
6. Be true to POP
7. Be very crime specific
8. Be guided by SARA – but not led astray!
Study environmental criminology
9. Use the crime triangle
10. Never forget opportunity makes the thief
11. Always ‘think thief’
12. Expect offenders to react negatively
13. Don’t be ground down by the displacement pessimists
14. Expect diffusion of benefits
Scan for crime problems
15. Say Cheers! when defining a problem
16. Know what kind of problem you have
17. Study the journey to crime
18. Know how hot spots develop
19. Learn if the 80–20 rule applies
Analyse in depth
20. Formulate hypotheses
21. Diagnose your hot spot
22. Know when to use high-definition maps
23. Pay attention to daily and weekly rhythms
24. Take account of long-term change
25. Know how to use rates and denominators
26. Identify risky facilities
27. Be ready for repeat victimisation
28. Consider repeat offending
29. Know which products are CRAVED by thieves
30. Look for crime facilitators
31. Check you have answered the five ‘W’ (and one ‘H’) questions
Find a practical response
32. Accept your key role at response
33. Increase the effort of crime
34. Increase the risks of crime
35. Reduce the rewards of crime
36. Reduce provocations
37. Remove excuses for crime
38. Find the owner of the problem
39. Choose responses likely to be implemented
Assess the impact
40. Conduct a process evaluation
41. Know how to use controls
42. Consider geographical and temporal displacement
43. Examine displacement to other targets, tactics and crime types
44. Watch for other offenders moving in
45. Be alert to unexpected benefits
46. Expect premature falls in crime
47. Test for significance
48. Calculate costs
Communicate effectively
49. Tell a clear story
50. Make clear maps
51. Use simple tables
52. Use simple figures
53. Design powerful presentations
54. Become a good presenter
55. Contribute to the store of knowledge
Foreword
You who read this manual are more important than perhaps
you think. Crime analysts are not well-known to the general
public. You don’t star in peak-time TV series or big-screen
movies as do behavioural profilers or forensic scientists. Even
some of your colleagues in the police aren’t sure what you’re
about. But you are the new face of policing.
For years the police have contented themselves with chasing
individual crimes after they have taken place. Crimes have
been regarded as episodes to be detected, and if they result in
a conviction the case is thought to be ‘solved’.
This is manifestly mad. So mad, in fact, it is astonishing that soci-
ety hasn’t rumbled it, complained very loudly and demanded a
smarter approach. Running after crooks relentlessly is too late,
like catching the horse (if you’re lucky) after it has bolted for the
hundredth time rather than learning how to lock the stable door. It is as though when aircraft
crashed we contented ourselves with finding someone to blame rather than changing procedures
or amending designs.
When people do consider causes of crime they tend to talk of distant issues that cannot be
changed quickly (like parenting or poverty); they neglect the more immediate causes – things
that it is often quite easy to influence. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that answers to crime
are lying all around us waiting to be picked up. That is what this manual is all about.
But who will champion this new approach when almost all those in the crime industry have a
vested interest in the status quo? The media prefer to see crime as a series of individual human
dramas which every now and then reward them with juicy headlines. Lawyers are steeped in tradi-
tional ways of doing things (indeed they are taught that precedence is a virtue) and are broadly
content with a system which puts them at the centre and feathers their nests. Most politicians,
shuffling from one policy portfolio to another, reckon crime can be tackled intuitively which, for
them, means being tougher if they’re of conservative inclination, and softer if they’re liberal. And
many criminologists have been too interested in theorising to be of any practical value to anyone
but themselves.
It has been left to a new breed of thoughtful police officers, plus a few diligent and unsung civil
servants, and one or two enlightened politicians in high places, to recognise that a new approach
is needed. This smarter way is based on the work of a precious minority of academics, many of
whose names you will come across in these pages. They are mostly criminologists, but their brand
of criminology is distinctive. For one thing it is intensely practical. It is concerned with outcomes.
For another, it is much more truly scientific and evidence-driven than the impenetrable analysis
that sometimes passes for good work in social science essays.
In short, they are consultants in crime reduction. Yet there has been nothing to distinguish these
intensely practical people from the great majority of sociological theorists that populate schools
of criminology and criminal justice. This led me to coin a term for them and for the new approach
they champion: crime science.
Crime science has three features. Its sole purpose is to reduce crime and so reduce victimisation.
It is scientific in its methodology, by which I mean it aims for the same high standards of evidence
that would be accepted by physicists or aeronautical engineers. And thirdly it is multidisciplinary:
Foreword
it recruits every possible skill towards its cause. That is why in the following pages you will see
ideas that come from geography, psychology, mathematics, epidemiology (the study of how dis-
ease spreads), economics and many other schools of knowledge.
Not all the academics I admire call themselves crime scientists, though I hope one day they will,
and as in any discipline there are healthy disagreements, not least about scientific methodologies.
But the concept of crime science groups together those who care about hard evidence, who are
concerned with how to change things, not merely theorise. Crime scientists look for patterns in
crime so that they can find ways to disrupt it.
One of the most important breakthroughs has been in rethinking the role of the police them-
selves. It involves a change in emphasis from chasing criminals to outwitting them. The idea,
developed by Herman Goldstein, is wonderfully simple: instead of being reactive to crime, con-
centrate on your biggest problems and seize the initiative. The name given to the idea is equally
straightforward: problem oriented policing, or simpler still, POP.
In reality POP involves some pretty sophisticated stuff. It requires smart thinking. Crime science
can create new tools to make POP possible, but who are the professionals who will do the analysis
of data and identify patterns at the local level? Who will construct hypotheses on how to intervene
and put those ideas to the test? Who will create strategies that the police and other crime reduc-
tion partners can then act on? Who can gently but firmly lead society away from being so reactive
to the new smart way of detecting baddies quickly and heading off trouble before it starts? Need I
say it? You.
Police analysts will become more important, indeed increasingly will be seen as crucial, if we are
to tackle crime more intelligently. You are the brains, the expert, the specialist, the boffin.
Your role requires three qualities that do not always come naturally: application, scepticism, and
persistence. Application because much of what follows on these pages has to be learned and
understood; it is counterintuitive, or at any rate is only self-evident once you have worked your
way through it. And application is essential in your day-to-day work because good science needs
good evidence and good evidence usually means hard work in finding, understanding and pro-
cessing the data. Cutting corners is almost certain to turn you from a crime scientist into a con
artist. You will need scepticism because that is the very foundation of good science. Never take
anything for granted. Beliefs come free, but evidence is costly, sometimes challenging our own
prejudices. Be sceptical reading this manual, be sceptical about what colleagues tell you (how do
they know, how reliable is their evidence, how much do they really understand the issues?), be
sceptical about data (do they really tell you what they purport to tell you?) and remember that sci-
ence is not a set of subjects like physics or biology, but a rigorous methodology for testing and
re-testing things we believe to be true. And you must be persistentbecause these are early days in
crime science; some people will disregard you, others will think you are meddling in things that
don’t concern you, most will need persuading.
Forgive us if you know much of this already. To those who are already well-versed in crime science
this manual may seem simplistic. But the truth is very few people yet understand these concepts,
and to most readers nearly all of what follows will be new. I hope it will be not only extremely
useful to you as a handbook, but exhilarating too.
Nick Ross
BBC Crimewatch UK
Chairman, the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, UCL
1
Read this first
This manual assumes that you are already job, and the early sections of the manual
working as an analyst and that you are accus- explain how you must take a more proactive
tomed to providing the kind of information approach. You cannot simply wait for your
needed to support police operations. This police colleagues to come to you with
means that: requests for information. Instead you must
take the initiative at every stage of the project
1. you know how to use modern computing
in defining the scope of the problem-solving
facilities and how to access and manipulate
effort, in trying to analyse the causes of the
comprehensive databases;
problem, in helping to find an effective
2. you know how to use software to map
response and in setting up the project so that
crime, to identify hot spots and to relate
it can be evaluated and the police can learn
these to demographic and other data;
from the results.
3. you routinely produce charts showing
weekly or monthly changes in crime at The manual also assumes that analysts who
force and beat level, perhaps to support take on this new role are interested in con-
Compstat-style operations; tributing to the development of their
4. you are accustomed to carrying out small profession. Assisted by vastly improved data-
investigations into such topics as the rela- bases and powerful computing hardware and
tionship between the addresses of known software, crime analysis is on the verge of
offenders and local outbreaks of car theft becoming an exciting new specialty. Indeed, it
and burglary; has already begun to attract a cadre of well-
5. you have probably carried out some before- trained and highly motivated professionals
and-after evaluations of crackdowns, say on who are vital to the development of policing in
residential burglaries or car thefts; and the twenty-first century. You can make your
6. you have some basic knowledge of statistics contribution by communicating the results of
and research methodology such as pro- your work in professional meetings and in the
vided by an undergraduate social science journals. By doing so, you will not only help
degree. your profession and policing in general, but
you will become a more informed and valu-
This manual builds on this experience to pre-
able resource to your own force.
pare you for a different analytic role as a key
member of a problem-solving team. Indeed, the The manual is short enough to get through in a
latest writings on problem-oriented policing weekend. It would be hard work and probably
see crime analysts as central to this new way of worth doing, but it was not designed to be read
policing communities. They argue that many of and then shelved. Instead, we hope that you will
the weaknesses of current practice in problem- find it to be an indispensable reference source
oriented policing result from the insufficient that you will keep near your desk, consulting it
involvement of well-trained crime analysts at whenever you need in the course of a problem-
each stage of the problem-solving process. solving project. This is why it is designed to be
robust, allowing for continuous use. When open
The manual prepares you for this new role by
at a particular step it is designed to lie flat on
providing you with a basic knowledge of prob-
your desk so that you can consult it easily when
lem-oriented policing and the related fields
working at your computer.
of environmental criminology and situational
crime prevention. These fields are encom- We have arranged the steps to follow logically
passed by the new discipline of crime science one from another, in line with the SARA model
and you cannot adequately function as a (Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment),
problem-solving crime analyst without being though each is self-contained and deals with a
conversant with them. Nor can you adequately specific topic. This should avoid your having to
function in this role unless you rethink your leaf through the manual, jumping from place to